Did Death in the Family Nearly Have Joker Reveal He Knew Batman's Identity?

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn whether Death in the Family nearly had Joker reveal he knew Batman was Bruce Wayne!

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and sixty-fifth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Death in the Family was originally going to have the Joker reveal that he knew that Batman was Bruce Wayne

STATUS:

I'm Going With False

DC Comics made history with 1988's Batman #427 (by Jim Starlin, Jim Aparo and Mike DeCarlo). In the issue, Jason Todd is betrayed by his own mother to the Joker, who savagely beats the young hero with a crowbar...

The villain then locks Jason and his mother up in a warehouse with a bomb...

and sadly, the bomb goes up before Batman can arrive to save them...

At the end of the issue, things look terrible, but Batman doesn't know whether Jason and Jason's mother died or not...

At the end of the issue, there was an ad for a pair of 1-900 numbers where people could vote as to whether Jason survived the explosion or not...

Amusingly enough, they were not allowed to specifically use the word "call this number for his death," notice how they used a roundabout way to say death.

The next issue, sadly, Jason was shown to have died (the vote was very narrow, less than a hundred votes separated him from life and death)...

Had the vote gone Jason's way, the only difference in Batman #428 would have been a single page (the timing of the release of the issue did not give them a whole lot of time to make changes), and the original Aparo/DeCarlo page went unused for years until Batman Annual #25 (where Superboy Prime punched reality to bring Jason back to life), which was published (in a slightly altered state) a year AFTER Aparo died...

While that was the only change in Batman #428, what about the other issues in the storyline? Would things have gone way different had the Joker NOT killed Robin?

WOULD THE JOKER HAVE LEARNED BATMAN'S SECRET IDENTITY HAD JASON LIVED?

An anonymous former DC staffer wrote to my buddy Daniel Best and revealed a secret about this page in Batman #429, after the Joker has become an ambassador for Iran and thus gained diplomatic immunity...

The staffer wrote, "was working at DC Comics during the Death Of Robin series and I was the one entrusted to do the production work on the book, as everyone in the company knew I could keep a secret. Denny O’Neil even managed to get me a private office to do the correction work on the actual death issue. I couldn’t do a damn thing until the votes came in and when they did it was no surprise and once I finished the book it was taken from me and sealed in an envelope and sent to print.

That isn’t the interesting part of the story.

The next book came into production and in this story Jim Starlin had a one-page sequence where Batman confronts the Joker only to find out that the Joker now knows he’s Bruce Wayne. This stunned me as it was brilliantly written by Starlin and drawn by Jim Aparo. Then I saw all the notes attached. I was to re-letter the sequence and take out this daring revelation that would have created a great deal of conflict in Batman’s life. If you look at the page you can clearly see it was re-lettered by me and that the character’s expressions just don’t work right with the dialogue. Panel two was the big 'I know you're Bruce

Wayne!' revelation."

As Best notes, it DOES seem evident that the lettering was altered in the above pages. It doesn't match in a few different panels.

JIM STARLIN REVEALS WHAT HE ORIGINALLY WROTE IN THE BATMAN/JOKER SCENE

Best turned to Jim Starlin, the writer of the issue, for answers. Starlin responded, "You've been misinformed. Never wrote anything like that. My alternative ending only had Robin living. Nothing more on the Joker than had already appeared."

When Best asked about the altered lettering, Starlin explained, "That I can help you with. Denny O'Neil was into secrecy on this story and budget conscious. The last page wasn't lettered until the vote on Robin was in. The alternate pages were never lettered. Not sure about the inking. My guess is John [Costanza] probably just wasn't available when the last page had to be lettered."

The anonymous staffer concedes that maybe the stuff he put in there wasn't intended to ever actually see print, and perhaps it was just placeholder stuff to fool people one way or the other, but he still (correctly, I think) notes it was a weird situation. Starlin, though, is fairly unequivocal about not having written the Joker as having discovered Batman's secret identity, so it would seem to be highly unlikely that Denny O'Neil would have just ever even considered altering Starlin's script to make such a major revelation (if it were to happen, it would have been O'Neil telling Starlin to write it, not O'Neil altering dialogue to make a major revelation like that).